In modern computer systems, classifying the volumes of emails people receive today has become a time consuming task. Services such as GMail (www.gmail.com) allow people to store two gigabytes of email. Incoming email piles up quickly if not processed constantly. Hunting through this mountain of email poses a daunting task for anyone. Solutions are required that allow messages to be automatically classified when received. This allows messages to remain grouped without requiring the user to spend large amounts of time classifying the messages.
Several solutions address the problem of sorting incoming messages, but each suffers from a significant drawback. First, the earliest “Mailsend” programs in the Unix operating environment allowed a user to create a file of rules which, when applied, could search the from, to, subject, or body of emails for patterns. The program would then sort the incoming mail into folders based on these rules. The major drawback was that the format of the rules was complicated, often requiring a system administrator to set up.
Second, improvements on Mailsend allowed the user to use wizards and other shortcuts to avoid the complexities of rule creation. For example, Microsoft's Outlook program presents the user with such a wizard. The first step asks whether email should be processed upon sending or receipt. The next step asks whether Outlook should classify messages based on information located in the message headers (subject, from, to, cc, etc.), user-definable classifications, existence of attachments, existence of special flags (such as priority flags), etc. Finally, Outlook can group the incoming messages together into folders based on the rules. This solution, while made easier, still requires significant overhead because the rules must be defined manually and in advance of run time execution.
Other solutions employ complicated, text-analysis algorithms to judge the “relatedness” of incoming messages to messages in the system. These systems can easily fail due to spelling errors, fragmented sentences, abbreviations, and the inability to capture similarity of synonyms. Therefore, there is a need in the art for an e-mail filing system that files received e-mail messages without requiring manual definition of filing rules.